The tradeoff between cost of the access network and quality of offered service to IoT devices, in terms of reliability and durability of communications, is investigated. We first develop analytical tools for reliability evaluation in uplink-oriented large-scale IoT networks. These tools comprise modeling of interference from heterogeneous interfering sources with time-frequency asynchronous radio-resource usage patterns, and benefit from realistic distribution processes for modeling channel fading and locations of interfering sources. We further present a cost model for the access network as a function of provisioned resources like density of access points (APs), and a battery lifetime model for IoT devices as a function of intrinsic parameters, e.g. level of stored energy, and network parameters, e.g. reliability of communication. The derived models represent the ways in which a required level of reliability can be achieved by either sacrificing battery lifetime (durability), e.g. increasing number of replica transmissions, or sacrificing network cost and increasing provisioned resources, e.g. density of the APs. Then, we investigate optimal resource provisioning and operation control strategies, where the former aims at finding the optimized investment in the access network based on the cost of each resource; while the latter aims at optimizing data transmission strategies of IoT devices. The simulation results confirm tightness of derived analytical expressions, and show how the derived expressions can be used in finding optimal operation points of IoT networks.